Our colleagues at fictional media entity Red Hot News snuck into the belly of the right-wing beast at the ARC2025 conference in February, where they interviewed delegates and attendees with some surprising ideas. While we can chuckle at the notion that gender equality will inevitably lead to bestiality or that almost all German academics are communists, what was also exposed was how racist, Islamophobic and misogynist rhetoric are disguised by calls for ‘free speech’ and ‘Christian values’. Read on for a look at some of the forces behind this movement…
The Alliance For Responsible Citizenship (ARC) was co-founded by controversial Canadian former psychologist Jordan Peterson, along with UK peer Baroness Phillipa Stroud, the former CEO of the Legatum Institute.
Legatum is a right-wing think-tank which was heavily involved in promoting Brexit, and was censured in 2018 by the Charity Commission over a pro-Brexit report it commissioned. The Commission concluded that Legatum had ‘crossed the line’, resulting in the removal of the report from their website.
The Legatum Group part-owns GB News’ parent company AllPerspectives Ltd., and the launch of GB News was aided by a £60 million cash injection from Legatum Ventures Ltd.
ARC’s current ties with Legatum include personnel and financing, and through Legatum it also has a close association with the Heartland Institute in the USA.
Heartland is a very influential promoter of climate denial – not surprising given that ExxonMobil was known to be a substantial backer, although Heartland stopped disclosing its funding sources after this was revealed.
In Germany, Heartland has worked closely with EIKE (the “European Institute on Climate and Energy”), pushing diesel vehicles over electric, coal energy over wind power, and growth over environmental protection. EIKE’s VP and spokesperson is Michael Limburg, who co-wrote the energy policy for the German far-right AfD party, and has stood as an AfD candidate.
Like many of the delegates at ARC, EIKE aggressively promotes ‘freedom of speech’ while simultaneously stirring up hatred against people its funders don’t like. In an extensive 2019 investigation, the German news platform Spiegel linked EIKE to the AfD’s demonisation of Greta Thunberg’s Fridays For Future campaign, characterising her as ‘Greta Tuna’ and ‘that climate protection hussy’. In the US, the Heartland Institute demonised climate scientists with a series of billboards which actually compared them to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.
Heartland also defended the ‘free-speech’ social media network Parler when tech giants Amazon, Google and Apple temporarily suspended it, over its failure to moderate posts calling for extreme violence ahead of the attack on the Capitol building following Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. Hundreds of posts called for killing of liberals, BLM activists, Black and Jewish people, public officials and even teachers. Climate denier and Heartland VP Jim Lakely likened the suspension to “East German Stasi tactics”, and his views were amplified and applauded by the institute’s own social media account.
These new adherents of free speech are quick to defend far-right extremist groups (eg Oath Keepers and Proud Boys) and conspiracists (eg QAnon). But their world view is also loosely tied to conservative “Christian” ideology (eg. evangelical Protestants in the US, and Catholicism in Eastern Europe) through a shared resistance to change. They all portray multi-culturalism, green economy, and human rights as challenges to a ‘functioning’ and traditional status quo. This manifests as a nationalistic and nativist agenda, as seen in Brexit and MAGA for example, and a new toxic masculinity which (while essentially misogynistic) disguises itself in the narrative that women are the weaker sex requiring protection from immigrants, Muslims and trans people.
Heartland is just one among several foundations backed by oil money and pushing climate denial. The American Enterprise Institute has received millions from ExxonMobil and the Koch Brothers, and their Senior Fellow Ian Rowe also spoke at ARC, calling out ‘victimhood’ amongst young people, and pushing a gender-conformist family agenda along with religious faith.
Weakness is a buzz word for these people – current Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch used her speech at ARC to set out her authoritarian right-wing stall, using the words ‘weak’ and ‘weakness’ over and over, almost spitting it out as something to be despised. She portrayed our welfare system as a privilege rather than as a right, needing protection from ‘exploitative’ migrants and ‘fraudulent’ unemployed and disabled.
Conservative ideology beguiles us with its declared mistrust of ‘establishment’ (eg the ‘Deep State’ or the civil service) and of global associations (such as the UN, EU, WHO etc.). While many progressives are quite understandably cautious of defending these institutions wholeheartedly, they are still more likely to advocate and promote gender equality, human rights, economic transformation and climate action, so it’s no wonder that those profiting from continued environmental destruction are funding the critical voices at ARC.
Another sinister development in the free speech movement is its professed alignment to Christianity, somehow disguising a populist promotion of inequality, prejudice and indifference as an imaginary version of Christian-based Western ‘civilisation’ threatened now by immigration, Islam, climate activists and gender equality. This can be seen in the anti-abortionists citing free speech rights in order to harangue vulnerable people outside clinics, claiming that the Bible defends their right to control over womens’ bodies. You may have noticed increased claims of Christian resurgence from right-wing platforms?
Former Tory MP Miriam Cates was one of several Evangelical Christians sharing a platform with the fascists at ARC. Her speech majored on declining fertility rates, with a warning that it would lead to “destabilising mass immigration”. She has also described the welfare state as a “millstone around the neck of the British economy”. Unsurprisingly as an ARC delegate, Cates has no desire to rein in the oil and gas sector – describing opponents as “extremist environmentalists”, she backed the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill last year. Surely speeches like hers are pretty removed from the core message of Christianity – that we should treat others as we should be treated ourselves?
Loving thy neighbour, and looking after the meek and the poor seem very distant concepts to the tax-averse funders of many ARC speakers. More than half of Nigel Farage’s Reform party donors in 2024 were from individuals in low-tax jurisdictions or with offshore interests, and one of the party’s largest donors is Thailand-based businessman Christopher Harborne.
A stated goal for ARC is “human flourishing”, but it happily shares its platform with figures from the data-tech behemoth Palantir, which helps ICE raids and deportations in the US and is sniffing round the NHS for all our patient data, ready for a future insurance-based system to replace the remnants of our once public service. Palantir’s head, Peter Thiel, spoke at ARC 2025 – he’s pushing for deregulation of AI, and a techno-feudal future, managed by entrepreneurial elites. Palantir’s UK Head Louis Mosely, grandson of fascist Oswald, has also participated in ARC events.
What exposes ARC’s professed alignment with Christian values the most is the absence of ‘the view from below’. Standard tickets for the privilege of listening to the rich and powerful voices on that platform were £1500. Apparently, the “inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven”, the meek and the poor, were simply not invited.
